Diary of a Yuppie Read Free

not agree with me. Let her help you, my boy. Let her guide you! I fear I must have been a false leader."
    "Mr. Blakelock—"
    "Go home, son, go home! I've had enough of you for one day."

2
    O H, YES , I have a very definite feeling that this crisis is not going to pass. I may find myself making a significant addition to the file drawer of my penciled fulminations. What a crazy collection it is—hundreds of pages of myself recording or imagining my talks with others! Before I married Alice I even used to write love letters to girls I hardly knew, or didn't know—sometimes to movie stars—which of course I was never mad enough to mail. When I was angry with people I would write down all the terrible things that I wanted to happen to them or draft legal documents dealing with their arraignment and condign punishment. I wrote out my dreams in the most copious detail and learned not to blush at my daytime erotic fantasies. I think I have learned the hard lesson that it is perfectly possible for a man to know himself if he will only accept the premise that he is probably not very different from his neighbor.

    Only yesterday, for example, I encountered my fellow clerk, Glenn Deane, on the steps going down to the 77th Street subway stop. He was out of tokens and asked if I had an extra one. There was a long queue before the booth. I said I was sorry, that I had only one. In fact, I had four in my pocket when I left him to stand in that queue.
    Now what am I telling myself? That Glenn would have done the same thing? Not necessarily. His own form of meanness may not embrace subway tokens. But I am confident that it embraces many larger things. It so happens that I buy twenty tokens at a time, and that I like to see how long they will last me. It is a kind of game, or perhaps the vestige of some ancestral miserliness; I may enjoy the clink of "golden" tokens in my palm. Yet I would willingly lend Glenn a thousand bucks, which is considerably more than he would ever lend me. This goes to show, not that I am more generous than Glenn, but that meanness is not measured by the amount withheld. We are all mean about something, which means that we are all mean.
    Take another example. The other day, again in the subway with Glenn, I emitted a silent but smelly fart. I could see by Glenn's puckered nostrils that he had noted it, and by a glance at a stout black woman standing before him and a shrug, I managed to shift the blame. Thousands of people do that kind of thing. It is not nice to do them, but it is better to face the fact that one does. I used to be ashamed of being scared in airplanes, and when I ceased to be ashamed, I ceased to be scared. As a matter of fact, I usually take care
not
to fart in the subway.
    Which all means that I believe I have occasional insights that some of my nearest and dearest lack. I certainly think that I know a good deal more about Mr. Blakelock than he knows about himself.
    To describe him. At sixty-nine Branders Blakelock is a tall, spare, ungainly man, bulging and tightening in the wrong places, with a high bald dome surrounded by a fringe of curly gray hair and a smooth bland face with small, shiny, twinkling blue eyes. His voice, which can be stentorian in court, is also capable of high, almost falsetto notes, and he has an exploding, cackling laugh which would be almost an insult were it not largely used to applaud his own sharp wit. He is brilliant, and he knows it and is not in the least ashamed to show that he knows it. At the Irving Association, his favorite club, named for the sage of Sunnyside and of which he has been president for some years, he loves to address the membership, either informally at the long table where he is famed for his barbed stories of New York worthies, past and present, or at the monthly dinner meetings, where he reads out the obituary list, ending in sweet, mournful tones with the famous couplet of William Cory's:
"They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you